Please, Mr. Nonsense was my father!

she/her | old enough to drink | Idk what to do with this blog yet

[behold-nonsense]

Ok pinned post time

Hi I'm Behold Nonsense, you can call me Behold (or Nonsense if u must idrc)

This is a sideblog that I'm probably just gonna use for personal aesthetics and posting my art/original work. I haven't written anything yet but I play many TTRPGs so expect worldbuilding

Ok Tag List which I'll try to keep updated:

I wish I knew how to make those tag links in posts I really do

GENERAL:

#oh shoot it me <- I post this whenever I actually say anything

#oh? aesthetic for me? <- any aesthetic stuff I post or reblog

#my art <- self explanatory, its the art that I made. Alternatively I use #my writing for actual written stuff.

#mood ig <- this is for stuff I resonate with but don't really know where to categorize it

AESTHETIC TAGS:

#Farm Girl Aesthetic <- this is for stuff that reminds me of growing up

#Knight Aesthetic <- for when I'm dreaming of being a knight

#Orc Aesthetic <- I like orcs and I wanna be one

ART/WRITING TAGS:

#Tag for Rodwira <- anything set in my high fantasy world Terrus (of which Rodwira is the main setting for my campaign)

#Tag for Tertiary <- my dark fantasy world Tertiary, campaign set in the Sterling Empire

#Tag for Firma <- an AU earth where every apocalypse happens at once. Currently a worldbuilding project and combines many genres (lots of scifi and cyberpunk atm)

#Tag for IV <- also surreal + dark fantasy setting with no human characters and lots of symbolism + allegory. Idk yet what I'm doing with it

#Tag for Soft Rains <- a semi-dark Woodland Creatures campaign during a nuclear bloom (large increase in flora after a nuclear event). Set in the fictional British village of Bremenshire

#I swear I'm a writer/artist <- any useful tips or tricks I find for art or writing

[johannesviii]

Repaired my fave jacket, got emotional, drew something about it

[soymoss]

knight pigeon

[soymoss]

today is Thursday, birds

[possessedopossum]

Fixing the Ashirra: A Historically Conscious Reimagining

Or: Why the Canon Version Makes No Sense and What to Do About It

The World of Darkness is a product of its time and place — America in the 1990s, written by people whose understanding of the Islamic world rarely extended beyond Orientalist tropes and headlines about Gulf War oil. The Ashirra, as presented in canon, is a monolithic, ahistorical, theological mess that exists primarily to be "the Camarilla but with turbans", and I would like to fix that.

But before we can fix the Ashirra, we need to understand when and why the Camarilla and Sabbat (as global phenomena) would actually emerge, because the writers are either illiterate when it comes to history or prefer to ignore it for the sake of the rule of cool.

The canon claims the Camarilla formed in the aftermath of the Anarch Revolt, in the 15th century. This is anachronistic nonsense.

In the 15th century, there was no concept of "Europe" as a political or cultural unit, travel between regions was slow, dangerous, and rare, communication across the continent took months and the idea of a continental vampire government would have been literally unimaginable. Not a single one of these points can get negated with the help of vampire powers.

The Camarilla cannot be a medieval or Renaissance institution. It is clearly a modern one, born of the same forces that produced the League of Nations, the United Nations, and the European Union. Think of what it requires: it needs reliable long-distance communication like telegraph or telephone, standardized travel like railroads and steamships, a shared political vocabulary (nationalism, international law, human rights), a common enemy to unite against (the Sabbat, mortal governments, the Inquisition).

These conditions did not exist until the 19th century. The 19th century was the age of:

Nationalism: The idea that people sharing a language and culture should have their own state.

Revolution: Liberal, nationalist, and socialist uprisings across Europe and the Americas.

Ideology: The birth of systematic political worldviews (liberalism, conservatism, socialism, anarchism).

Colonialism: The formal division of most of the world into European spheres of influence.

Communication: The telegraph, the railroad, the steamship, the mass-circulation newspaper.

This is the world that could produce something like the Camarilla: a bureaucratic, hierarchical, international institution designed to protect the interests of established powers against revolutionary threats. Camarilla's values include stability over justice, hierarchy over merit, secrecy over accountability, gradual reform over revolution. This is just 19th century conservatism dressed in gothic drag.

The Sabbat cannot be an ancient cult of Caine-worshippers, because it looks like a product of the age of revolution, born from the same ferment that produced:

Marxism: The idea that the existing order is irredeemably corrupt and must be destroyed.

Anarchism: The rejection of all hierarchical authority.

Nationalism: The belief that your people have been wronged and must reclaim their destiny.

Fascism: The cult of violence, the beloved leader, and the glorious mythical past.

The Sabbat should be a salad of extremist ideologies, not a unified sect. So, a Sabbat cell in St. Petersburg might be Marxist-Leninists who believe that vampire politics are class warfare, a Sabbat cell in the Caucasus might be Armenian ultranationalists who want to purge all Turkic vampires (or the other way around), a Sabbat cell in the American South might be a death cult that worships Caine as the first revolutionary.

If the Camarilla is a 19th-century product, the Ashirra is older — not because vampires are more traditional in the East, but because the Islamic world developed concepts of international law and transregional governance centuries before Europe.

Let me be clear about why the canon "Camarilla but with turbans" Ashirra doesn't work:

The Islamic world has never been politically unified. For most of its history, it has been divided into competing empires, dynasties, and caliphates. The Umayyads fought the Abbasids, the Abbasids fought the Fatimids, the Ottomans fought the Safavids, the Mughals did their own thing. Each claimed to be the true inheritor of the Prophet's authority and each despised the others. The idea that vampires from Morocco to Indonesia would share the same political structure, the same legal traditions, the same loyalties, is absurd.

A vampire sect that pretends to unify all of these is an American fantasy. There could be, like, at least three Ashirras at the same time: Ottoman (Sunni, Hanafi), Safavid (Shia, Ja'fari), and Mughal (Sunni, Hanafi but with heavy local syncretism). They would hate each other, compete for influence and issue fatwas declaring each other's leaders heretics. And this is only one specific historical period I mentioned (16th-18th centuries), there would be even MORE Ashirras throughout history.

West Asia is not and has never been exclusively Muslim. Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others have lived in the region for centuries. They should have their own vampire traditions, their own legal frameworks and alliances. They would not create a separate sect for themselves, instead, they would exist within the same political structures as Muslim vampires, as dhimmis (protected peoples) with limited rights. A historically conscious Ashirra should have a millet system, different religious communities governed by their own laws, under the overall authority of the Muslim majority.

The "assassin from the sands" Banu Haqim stereotype is so obvious and so tiresome, but the deeper problem is the conflation of judicial authority with executive violence. A qadi does not execute his own judgments. He does not hunt the guilty or sneak through shadows with a poisoned dagger. He sits in a court, hears testimony, and issues a ruling. Then somebody else enforces it.

The Banu Haqim should not be assassins. They should be jurists, scholars, and judges— the spiritual heart of the Ashirra, the ones who write the fatwas, who interpret the law, who struggle with the question of what justice and faith mean in a cursed existence.

Some of them can be vigilantes who take the law into their own hands when the system fails. Some of them can be corrupt and issue fatwas for money or favor. Some of them can be mystics who see the law as a veil over a deeper truth. But the core of the clan, imo, should be judicial, not martial. Islam is a religion of civil order, it has lawmen instead of priests, and the lesser jihad is only a small part of it, not the core.

The diablerie question is also more interesting than canon allows, and I think the reputation of serial diablerists can get attached to Banu Haqim without any curses involved. In Islamic law, a murderer's family has three options: retribution (qisas), blood money (diyya), or forgiveness ('afw). For vampires, this should apply to diablerie as well as murder.

Qisas: The victim's lineage may diablerize a member of the killer's lineage in return.

Diyya: The killer pays a massive blood price — territory, services, childer.

'Afw: The victim's lineage forgives the killer, considered the highest spiritual act.

The evidentiary standard for hadd crimes (including murder) is impossibly high — four adult male Muslim witnesses of impeccable character. Diablerie happens in private, there are almost never four witnesses.

The result is that most diablerists walk free in the eyes of formal law. But the victim's family can still seek a fatwa permitting private retribution. This creates a system of legalized blood feuds, managed by the Banu Haqim but not controlled by them. The qadi issues the fatwa; then the feud proceeds according to understood rules. It may last centuries. I think this framework makes more sense than the clan of judges being the most notorious criminals.

I don't like the canon plot about the Camarilla-Ashirra alliance and in my personal headcanon it simply doesn't exist. It's such a lazy move that ignores the history of the region and shies away from the uncomfortable topic of colonialism in order not to hurt white player's feelings. The Ashirra should despise the Camarilla with a burning passion.

The Camarilla is a European institution, it emerged and solidified during the period of European colonialism. It would have extended its influence into the Muslim world through the same mechanisms as mortal colonialism — trade, military conquest, economic pressure.

The Ashirra would have fought back, and would have lost. Not completely, and not everywhere, but enough to be permanently scarred. The relationship between the two should be defined by resentment, collaboration, and ongoing struggle. Older vampires remember Sykes-Pico agreement, and they should dream about tearing British and French Ventrue in half, because the said agreement drew idiotic border lines across their domains.

I think that many Ashirra vampires would despise the Camarilla for what it did to their homelands — the invasions, the occupations, the extraction of wealth, the imposition of foreign laws. But at the same time, many would collaborate by selling out their own people for personal gain, adopt European titles and manners, become clients of Ventrue merchant families. Many would be ambivalent, they would recognize the Camarilla's power, hate it, but see no alternative to it.

This creates conflict within the Ashirra about how to respond to the West. Should it modernize, adopt Camarilla methods, try to compete? Should it return to its roots, reject foreign influence, purify itself? Should it find a third path, neither Western nor traditional? There is no consensus. There are only factions, constantly fighting.

The fact that Ashirra exists at all in modern nights is simple Western ignorance. The Ottoman Empire fell a century ago, the political structures that supported the Ashirra — the caliphates, the sultanates, the imperial bureaucracies — they are all gone. What remains? Nostalgic elders who remember the old days, fragmented local powers who control individual cities or regions, a few surviving institutions that have no connection to each other. The Ashirra as a unified sect is dead, it has been dead for a century. The only people who pretend otherwise are those who remember when it was alive.

The Banu Haqim qadis no longer hold the power they used to. The world has changed, because now economic power matters more than scripture. A Ventrue-backed corporation can do what a Banu Haqim judge could not. The clan has more conflicts with itself than with outsiders —qadis from different madhahib issuing contradictory rulings, elders trying to preserve traditions that the young see as obsolete, families feuding over inheritances that have lost their meaning.

There are still vampires who call themselves "Ashirra" and there are still those who follow Sharia of the Night. There are still courts where a qadi's word carries weight, but they are local, fragmented and nostalgic. The Ashirra is a memory — beautiful, sad and lost to time. There is no "Ashirra policy" on anything, only what this qadi decides, what that sheikh wants, what this elder remembers. The end.

The way all of this is written (or more like not written, lmao) in canon is stupid. I remember one of the rulebooks saying that modern Ashirra strongholds are Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. Fucking what? These countries hate each other, they are political and spiritual enemies that have nothing in common, and Afghanistan is in no condition to be a stronghold of anything.

The canon Ashirra is a fantasy, it is a product of writers who did not understand Islamic history, and were content to reproduce stereotypes.

I want to make Ashirra messy, fractured, and contradictory, like the history it emerges from. I want it to have competing empires, legal traditions, and religious communities where religion actually matters. I want to talk about how it has been shaped by colonialism and is still dealing with the trauma. The Ashirra is dying, and the Kindred who remember its glory days are bitter, nostalgic, and dangerous, and this kind of character can make a very compelling hero or villain.

There's the last issue I would like to mention: blood sorcery. For the love of God, do not use the word "sihr" for this like Whitewolf did. Sorcery is a very serious sin because it is considered disbelief (you seek powers not from God = you do not believe in God), no Muslim vampire would do "sihr". That doesn't mean they can't throw fireballs though, you just need a better name for the fireballs.

In my chronicle, Banu Haqim call their magic "Ayat" — meaning signs, verses, evidence. It is the term for the verses of the Quran, chosen because it frames vampiric powers as given by God. To Banu Haqim "sorcerers", who aren't in fact sorcerers, but scholars, the word ayat means miracles, wonders and marvels of the physical universe that point to the Creator. The birds can fly because God wills so, and a Banu Haqim can fry your ass with a fireball because God wills so as well. The word "sihr" should be instead applied to infernalism, and instead of a "sorcerer" you can simply say "mystic". An Islamic mystic is somebody who looks for intimate knowledge of God, and in this framework, the Ayat, whether a discipline or a custom path of thaumaturgy, is exactly that, a tool for understanding.

Would you like to read more? I have other stuff on Ashirra, Banu Haqim and VtM lore in general, bc other clans and factions have a lot of bullshit too, and I can suggest actual ideas on what narratives to craft instead, not just moan and bitch that the canon is bad.

[relleytrots]

Oh, this right here is the Good Shit.

[mxwhore]

i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!

[aetherograph]

i love you smog tests for cars i love you clean air regulations i love you HEPA filters i love you dam removal i love you planting native gardens i love you monarch butterflies (up 64% in 2026!) i love you working for decades to bring the condors back from zero to 300+ in the wild i love you inventing little machines to pick up the plastic fishing nets and other trash in the sea i love you occupational health and safety regulations i love you environmental protection agencies i love you unions i love you social aid programs i love you food not bombs i love you sea shepherds i love you most countries stopping industrial whaling and more humpback whales now than ever before i love you saving the forests i love you little libraries i love you take what you need cupboards/fridges i love you secular food pantries i love you public bathrooms i love you all-ages playgrounds i love you museums i love you aquariums + zoos i love you restoring peregrine falcons to nyc i love you letting beavers fix the river i love you releasing wolves into the wild i love you bison recovery efforts i love you landback i love you reducing light pollution i love you freeway sound baffle walls i love you advertising bans i love you public outreach and education i love you maria montessori i love you queer clinics i love you people working really hard and succeeding at fixing the world and making it safer for all living beings!

[cat-the-comet]

devastating: artist who has not practiced fundamentals enough to execute high concept idea eats shit

[gothredy]

[motherfucker-unlimited]

Germans completely outdid the english language by calling tv a farseer. They got their orcish shamans to name that shit

[da-riya]

[gustave-caillebotte-paintings]

-Clump of Chrysanthemums, Garden at Petit Gennevilliers-

[fasrgswragf-deactivated20250703]

[crimegoku]

Capulets vs Montagues

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

Two houses, utterly devoid of dignity

[my-dailydreams]

[cheaphalloweencostume]

The iron hook slid free from his shoulder with a wet metallic shriek. Something black and arterial splashed across the stones between them.

The torturer stepped back instinctively. Not out of mercy. Out of surprise. The prisoner laughed. Not loudly. Worse than loudly. Softly. Like he had just remembered a private joke older than civilization.

“You still think pain is a language,” he said.

Another blow. This time across the mouth. Teeth cracked. Blood sheeted down his chin in long ribbons.

The interrogator hissed through clenched teeth. “Tell me where God went.”

The prisoner turned his head slowly. There was blood in his smile now.

“There are organisms,” he said, “living beneath Antarctic ice that have never seen the sun and have still learned how to eat.”

The room had gone very still. Somewhere in the dark, machinery groaned.

The interrogator grabbed him by the jaw hard enough to bruise bone.

“You think this makes you immortal?”

The prisoner spat a clot of red onto the floor between them.

“No,” he whispered.

“I think it makes you temporary.”

The torches flickered.

For one impossible second, the interrogator became aware of his own pulse. The heat in his veins. The soft wetness of his eyes. The damp animal electricity inside every living thing. The prisoner watched realization bloom across his face and smiled wider, blood running between his teeth.

“You cannot threaten a creature from the dirt,” he said, “with returning to the dirt.”

— excerpt from Shit I Just Made Up To Exemplify How All This Tumblr Prose Sounds

[null-is-sparing-you]

Tags from @somebodytolove31

#ok well aside of the dialogue i think its good#“not loudly. worse than loudly. softly” is very very good im sorry to say#either you failed op or i have bad taste#maybe both

Honestly... Perhaps what's going on here is that at no point are we discussing "What makes writing good".

This piece was emotionally powerful.

The mix of dialog and scenery helped pull me in.

The metaphors were unusual and yet fullly parsable. hell, I could feel the *threat* from the prisoner's description of the creatures in the artic ice.

The emotional crisis from the interrogator felt.

And through all this, we are left with a sense of being foreign to the scene, despite being able to fully understand it. We're invited in to both perspectives - the perspective of the interrogator who must face an emotional reality he was wholey unprepared for, and the perspective of a prisoner who has accepted and welcomes what to come. Who has clearly delt with and is prepared to deal with hardships and GAH!!!

Okay enough jushing, I had a point -

This writing feels "Good" because it is "Emotionally effective" If writing is about communicating, then this piece is powerful because it certainly communicates!

One might argue it's not "good" in an accademic sense. But honestly? TO HELL WITH THAT!

Acadamia exists to help us understand what is, and how we might use it. It does not get to make the determination for us what is good or bad. If we are brought along with the piece, and get to be brought into the experience, does that not make the piece worthwhile? Does that not mean that, if a piece appears bad in an academic sence, that it is the academics who have missed something?

This fake exceprt captured so much in the short amount of time it had with us. Sure, there are rough parts, but even the rough parts contribute towards delivering the scene's setting, stakes and message!

Honestly, if there is any failing in this piece, it's that it failed to impart the message the author was attempting to capture because it was being too good at emulating the works that it was inspired by. The author must have understood, on a subconcous level if not the councous level, what it is that drives a piece to capture the attention of Tumblr users, and they captured that well. In doing so, they ironically undermined their own goals of highlighting the issues with this kind of writing.

[somebodytolove31]

Ok I'm gonna reply with the discussion I had with friends about this piece because they put it in words better than I can. Yes writing doesn't have to be academically good and you don't need to be a good writer but I think you're limiting yourself by not analyzing why a piece feels "off" for someone else when it's fine for you

Also there is an annoying amount of . where there should be commas and its pissing me off but thats a nitpick

[tfc-hockey]

Literally how this shit sounds to me

[lennox-mutual-fanblog]

Art by @behold-nonsense

[misselaney]

Natural Black Hair Tutorial! Usually Black hair is excluded in the hair tutorials which I have seen so I have gone through it in depth because it’s really not enough to tell someone simply, “Black hair is really curly, draw it really curly.” 

The next part of Black Hair In Depth will feature styles and ideas for designing characters and I will release it around February. If you would like to see certain styles, please shoot me a message!

[smallrevolutionary]

YES! BOOSTINGGGG FOR MY FOLKS WHO WANNA/NEED TO KNOW HOW

[badasserywomen]

so nice to see youre back!!

your scenes always look so beautiful. the characters look so grounded in their environment despite the comparatively simpler style. how do you do your backgrounds? and do you have any tips for bringing it all together? i have a hard time making my characters look like they fit in the scene

Because i do like 10-15 cinmatic lore shots a month, i mostly use 3D assets, then work it into my style with linework, coloring etc until it matches.

Its a great tool and allowed to me expand my scenes. I think its also dependant of your artstyle and getting it to match, assets tend to be too realistic sometimes and dont match my work, so i prefer to work from basic and do my own lighting and everything. Heres an example.

[tyrantisterror]

A while back I saw a post going around about how people hate modern retellings of Greek myths that confirm to the standards of the modern day because they're too cowardly to be "true to the myth." And, like, I get it, and I also think Lore Olympus kinda sucks, but "retelling an old myth in a way that confirms to the viewpoint of the modern storyteller" is actually the main reason we have any records of myths at all. If you want ONLY the original version of a given myth to exist, then pretty much all of mythology would have died back during the days of oral tradition.

People have been retelling myths with their own spin reflecting their own values and interpretations since before we invented writing. Homer didn't invent the Odyssey or the Trojan War, he just wrote a really popular version of those stories, and did so according to the values of his time. He made the Lore Olympus of his day.

So, like, yeah, hate modern myth retellings if you think they suck. You can even hate them for making choices that are worse than the ones in older versions of them that you like. But to hate them just in principle because they changed things at all is asinine. Myths are fluid things, to be retold and reinterpreted as the storyteller pleases. That's how they survive.

[tyrantisterror]

Also, once you get over the petulant and frankly nonsensical complaint of "This isn't true to the original myth!", you get to have the much more fun adventure of analyzing how different versions of myth are in conversation with each other.

Example: I love Arthuriana, and almost every version of the King Arthur story works with the premise that Arthur was a nearly perfect King. This means each version in turn reflects a different author's idea of what a near-perfect king is. Is he a conqueror, or a peacemaker? Does he rule by might, or by diplomacy? Is he wise and experienced, or innocent and naive? Is he a furry? You know, important questions.

And even the adaptations that try to subvert our expectations by showing Arthur to be a bad king, actually, are playing into that conversation - because it is a pretty powerful statement to look at a history of stories about the best possible king and say, "No king can be good."

All of this isn't to say I love EVERY Arthur story. There are some that I dislike intensely, but even those have some interesting contributions to make to the conversation that is this folklore's history of retellings. And Arthur survives because we find new angles to tell his story from, even if some of those angles suck ass.